‘Me, too. And we both achieved it, didn’t we?’ Shirley flicked a speck of fluff from the sleeve of her black suit, crossed her shapely legs and hardened her tone. ‘But back to the present—’

Back to us being two women who dislike each other and don’t try too hard to hide it, thought Marianne.

‘There’s something I need you to do for me,’ said Shirley.

One of us is nevertheless capable of asking the other for a favour. ‘And what might that be?’

Shirley then launched into a tale of how she had overheard Laura and Jake arguing that morning. ‘Their bedroom door was closed and I heard them when I passed by on my way downstairs. I had no idea what it was about, but Laura didn’t speak to Jake during breakfast and he was skulking behind the Financial Times.’

‘Come on, Shirley! Jake is hardly the skulking type.’

‘You haven’t heard the rest of it. When Jake had left for the office, I asked Laura what was wrong and she told me to mind my own business—’

‘Good for her,’ Marianne cut in, ‘and if what you want from me is to find out for you, forget it, Shirley.’

‘I haven’t finished the story yet. And perhaps you won’t think it a coincidence, which I don’t, that Laura then went into the living room, where the au pair was doing the dusting, and fired her.’

‘Trust you to put two and two together and make five!’ Marianne exclaimed. ‘If you can’t see that Jake has eyes for nobody but Laura, it’s time you got yourself some glasses, Shirley. I’d also suggest that you have your brains tested. Another useful piece of advice, is a woman who messed up her own married life should stay the hell out of her daughter’s.’

‘What a cruel bitch you are, Marianne! And don’t give me that crap about having to be cruel to be kind. You’ve never shown me a scrap of kindness, so why would I expect you to now?’

Shirley rose from the chair and made the angry exit Marianne had seen her, over the years, make time and again after a confrontation with this relative or that – and most frequently with the man now her ex-husband.

When Marianne first met Peter Kohn he was a bewildered young lad, torn from his family by circumstances neither he, nor his parents, could have envisaged. If they had, they would surely have run for their lives as their more prudent brethren had, long before Hitler marched into Austria.

Marianne had not forgotten Sigmund Moritz’s anxiety about his relatives in Vienna. Then an evening came when he received a message from them, and Marianne’s father and her Uncle David had taken turns at the wheel to drive him immediately to Dover, to meet a Channel steamer.